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Comment by boc | Hacker News Reader

IANAL but restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a “real” thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract.

If you’re a “free speech platform”, who are you to adjudicate whether a leak of corporate information is malicious vs a brave whistleblower?

This is why we have a court system. Twitter needs to decide what they are actually trying to accomplish with their direction, because right now it appears that this was all about changing the censors, not removing them.

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I am also not a lawyer, but it seems like there is a large gray area when it comes to theft of trade secrets.

For example, Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison for copying a confidential spreadsheet containing Waymo status updates (out of the charges against him, that's the only one he pleaded guilty to - the rest were dropped).

Calling layoffs "trade secrets" is some real double-speak and overreach.

Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point where that can even be considered a point of debate.

Nobody is calling the layoffs trade secrets. The thread is about pictures of an internal slack channel, and other private information.

Is your point that it doesn't matter if those "pictures of an internal slack channel" actually contain trade secrets of if they show some people posting blue hearts to cheer up their coworkers? IANAL but I think it does matter what those pictures contain.

I was responding to the parent's statement that "restrictions on confidential information only apply to government classification of information. Private classification isn’t a 'real' thing, it’s just a breach of a private contract."

This is not the case - you can be convicted of a felony and go to jail for taking a private company's confidential information. Nowhere did I call layoffs a trade secret.

Until it is publicly released, it is exactly that. You may be surprised to learn that competitors track this information.

All those employees signed NDAs that said they would not disclose private company communications… this is way different than censoring a user who is under no such agreement.

The difference is that Twitter does not enforce those agreements as quickly for any company that's not Twitter.

Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.

And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a public space... and then he/someone at Twitter immediately burns that narrative on something trivial that doesn't even matter.

The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's probably internal HR.

But that's because Twitter has no capabilities to enforce them at the same speed for other companies. If processing speed depends on proximity to their legal department, of course Twitter will be able to verify their own agreements faster. That's just physics, not necessarily double standards.

It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.

That's the HFT/exchange problem in a nutshell -- if you want to claim an equitable platform, then you have to artificially slow some requests to what you can guarantee for all.

But they never claimed to be an equitable platform with regards to that issue, did they? Musk might idealistic, but not that idealistic.

To be fair, some of his early comments indicated that all legal speech was to be allowed.

That was obviously wrong, as lots of legal speech makes the platform worse (eg, spam or spam-like behavior), but it was one of the claims made.

To be fair, Musk also pledged that Twitter would not become a "free for all" in terms of speech.

> Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the platform)

Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla having the browser and the foundation, but just not familiar with Twitter.

Was illustrating conceptual. I don't think they have an actual like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Though maybe they should?

But does Twitter have a signed copy of all those agreements? No. How could they?

Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level of moderation that goes against their "free speech" principles.

Uhh, not from Twitter the product's vantage it's not.

So Twitter will now take down leaked internal comms from Facebook? What about from NYT? What about from CIA?

Obviously they have the right to do this, but yes it's also obviously hypocritical given Musk's approach.

But Elon Musk didn’t own the company when they signed those NDAs. He’s a “free speech absolutist”. Why would he allow such abominations to be enforced?

It's not about censorship per se. There will always been censorship. Removing spam is censorship, removing copyrighted material is censorship.

There's a difference between removing a politically neutral piece content which violates some arbitrary rules and censoring political news which benefit a certain party.

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